03 May 2014

How We (re)Designed the Icon Cast Logo

At the very beginning the task to create an app icon looked quite straightforward. There were a few ideas how our it could look like and with my bright new crayons I immediately draw all of them on a piece of paper. I just thought all of them looked quite nice. Moreover there seemed to be just a little more work to be done. And there actually was until a small twist.

We selected the most simple image so it could be easily created and would be most suitable for an app icon. I opened my colour palettes I have created while working on some previous projects and chose colours we liked the most.

Usually, you don't see your mistakes at the very beginning

Then I opened an image editor and started to create the icon itself. From the beginning it looked somehow weird, lacking something important. So I tried to seek some inspiration. I liked the texture of the old violet-white iTunes icon. So I applied it to the individual parts of our icon. Somehow with Vaclav we proclaimed that the app icon is finished and it would to be used. But this is not our app icon, isn't it? Well, of course not! It just hurts my eyes.

The more I looked at that icon, the more I disliked and hated it. I saw that everything about it was wrong. And after some time I jus said "We cannot release the app with this mess. There is no way the whole world is going to see this disaster. I just have to remake it, create something else." And I have to admit, that as I look at the drawings now, they do not look as good as they did before. Yes, when you design something, taking a break (even a few days) is necessary.

Take breaks and with fresh eyes you will see things differently

I went back to the images we had at the very beginning. The main idea was colouring, which had to be transformed into an icon. We considered the freedom to choose icon colours to be a really important feature and wanted to have it in the icon somehow.

We had some idea of a bucket, but it was from the side and actually looked just grey and still lacked the most important message. Then this thought appeared: "rotate" the bucket so it's content could be visible. So once again, I opened the image editor and draw the bucket and it looked promising. As we were playing with the application itself, we built up a dozen of colour palettes, from which I chose the violet-yellow combination.

Icon that stands out of the crowd

I went for the dominant violet, because it's a rarely used app colour and does not get lost among other, mostly blue, app icons. Then I added some shades to the bucket itself and to the colours pouring out of the bucket. And finally I thought that this was something that wouldn't hurt your eyes and would make a nice app icon.

Vaclav has also found an interesting scheme about colours and logos, according to which our app is creative and optimistic. That sounds cool. After all, we believe not only our app, but also our users are creative.